Herald of Steel

"Lord Pasha, we should be able to break through before the next week!"

Alexander was outside his tent observing the huge walls of Caira get pounded repeatedly by his catapults, when he received this 'cheerful' update from one of his chief artillerists, one who was responsible for coordinating fire in the right side of the wall.

The man was where for his daily update.

"Mmmmm! Good job. I look forward to it."

However, despite Alexander's words, the man sounded hardly that thrilled, giving a rather anemic hum.

This was rather strange given that you would think Alexander would be a lot more excited hearing the close deadline.

The reason for this was revealed in Alexander's internal monologue,

'One week is likely too optimistic. He was only saying this to please me. These walls may look like they are full of cracks and just about to shatter, but I suspect this is just on the surface. Stone is surprisingly hard to smash through.

I think we will need at least a fortnight to actually punch a hole through…. And then perhaps another week or two to storm the place.'

The true estimated time caused Alexander to lampoon.

It had been a full month since the siege of Caira, and up until now, other than letting his ally raid and plunder the country, all he had been doing was firing his catapults relentlessly to try and soften up the defenders up there.

The actual taking of the wall physically was yet to occur, i.e.- assaulting the walls using ladder rushes with cover fire from the catapults. Experience more content on M V L

And this speed of progress greatly distressed the man.

It had already rolled over to the middle of February, spring having unknowingly crept up on them.

This meant that the timeline Alexander had set for his return had already been broken, thus making him really anxious to return home. There were a lot of things for him to do back in Zanzan.

And even if there was not he still wanted to go.

Just him being in the city would manage to calm many of the destabilizing elements that were starting to slowly sprout.

With him there, the ambitions of the various nobles would be curbed to a thin margin and any outside malicious influence would have a hard time germinating.

All these considerations hence made Alexander say to himself,

'Tsk, I really should start building a trebuchet! Then I can be lobbing one hundred to two hundred kilos of stones from the height of literal skyscrapers. If I did that, this entire siege would have already been over by now.'

'The problem is… a counterweight catapult is like the jet fighter of ancient times. Only very few, very skilled powers are capable of building one. My engineers are not good enough.'

It was not that Alexander had not thought of building a trebuchet but that it proved a bit too challenging for his men.

One might think that building a trebuchet is just like building a bigger, better catapult.

But this was like saying that the propeller driven World War 2 fighters are the same as the ones powered by jet fighters.

In reality, the two used very different technologies.

One used internal combustion to drive pistons, while the other forced a mixture of fuel and air into a propeller fan at supersonic speed and made it spin.

In the same way, the massive trebuchets seen in movies and games were very divergent from their older catapult cousins.

The catapults were basically huge slings, whereas counterweight trebuchets used the mechanism of levers and moments.

To operate a catapult, you pulled back on the wooden arm, the arm resisted that pull due to being attached to a cable made of twisted, processed animal sinew, this resistance made the 'animal rope' get stretched like a rubber band thus storing potential energy in itself, and then when you suddenly let go, the 'sinew rope' suddenly snapped back into place, transforming all that potential energy into kinetic energy.

And since the wooden arm was attached to this rope, it would also get yanked back into place, thus flinging the stone that was put into the arm basket high up into the air.

This was the basic mechanism, but there could be many versions of this.

For example, instead of the complex mechanism of stretching and bending the animal sinew attached to the arm, the much simpler instance of bending the entire wooden arm could be used, making it be the container of potential energy itself.

This basic principle was very similar to a game many of us used to play in our classroom, where you took a steel or plastic ruler, placed a small paper ball at one end, and then shot it after bending the long 'lever' and letting go.

And to do this here, the arms of this version of catapults were made from especially soft wood like pine or fir, that, once properly furnished and treated, could bend nearly to a full arch, as if it was made of rubber, showing the surprising inherent springiness of some species of wood.

Such simple catapults were designed as such to save on money and material, as animal sinew was surprisingly hard to manufacture and had a much more limited lifespan.

So after a certain number of shots, they would have to be replaced.

Wooden 'spring armed' catapults were on the other hand much more durable as well as much more easily replaceable.

Not to mention that it is much simpler in design and construction.

For example- the 'spring armed' catapults were simply 'loaded' by hand, i.e.- a group of men would usually tug on the rope attached to the arm, and once it was sufficiently bent, just let it go, causing the stone to fly out.

This also made them much smaller and easier to transport.

Meanwhile, a sinew catapult was much bigger and more sophisticated.

Because to make it, at first, an elaborate framework had to be installed to house the arm and the rope, making sure all of them were properly held in place.

Then second, a winch like mechanism was needed to be placed in the back to bend the arm because it was too hard for simple, raw muscle power to stretch the sinew rope to its limit.

This winch was kind of like the ones used to tow cars, a steel cylinder with spokes or holes on either end.

So the artillerists would spin the winch by either manually rotating the spokes by hand or by sticking a wooden stick into the holes of the winch and using it as a kind of lever.

Whichever way was used, it would cause the rope attached to the arm to get wound up, pulling the basket containing the stones back with it and stretching the sinew rope that was tied to it on the other hand.

The drawback of such sophistication was the cost and skills needed to make the good quality metal winch and the other structures, meaning only very rich lords possessing a lot of skilled engineers like Alexander could afford to use it.

However, the upsides were very much worth it since it brought a much greater range and payload capacity.

If a simple hand drawn catapult like the Margraves had could launch a five kilo weight about a hundred meters away, then Alexander's version had twice the range and three to four times the lethality.

It was a very fair exchange in his opinion, which was why the Heeats were so interested in learning from Alexander's design.

However, despite the catapult's impressive accomplishments, it still failed to take down walls as quickly as Alexander would have liked.

But upgrading to a trebuchet was easier said than done, especially the counterweight one he was imagining.

To be truly able to smash down walls quickly, Alexander needed to build a 'catapult' that had an arm going from anywhere from 10 meters to 30 meters in extreme cases.

This arm would be placed in a pivot, with the much longer end of the pivot holding the projectile while the other shorter end would hold a bucket filled with stones.

The projectile would weigh 100 to 200 kg, while the bucket of stones would act as the counterweight and weigh as much as two tonnes!

It was this mechanism that allowed these magnificent machines to possess the extreme lethality that they did, for no amount of animal sinew could rival the energy released from a two tonne weight dropping from 10 stories high!

The main trouble was building a frame and arm strong enough to withstand such immense forces.

The requirement for the arm went without saying- it had to be the workhorse of the entire thing.

But the machine also put immense pressure on the frame hosting the arm, especially as when the counterweight was let go, the huge bucket tended to violently swing back and forth upon reaching its trough, expending all the gained kinetic energy.

Hence heavy, dense woods like ash or ebony had to be used to make the frame to make sure it did not simply snap.

And here came the first major problem- the various techniques used to treat the green wood and turn it into good quality timber were yet to be discovered.

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